SGI: getting the "G" to stand for "graphics" again

Remember when I reported from the HPC User Forum last month that CEO Bo Ewald had just told the audience that SGI was getting back into the visual supercomputing business? My favorite quote:

It was really stupid for the company to stop doing visualization types of things.

Well, I know a little birdy who’s at IEEE Vis this week. He ran into the SGI engineer in charge of developing their next generation graphics platform. This is what the birdy told me in an email today

I asked him about their CEO’s comments about getting back into the visual supercomputing business. He said that they were developing a new visual supercomputer based on the x86 architecture (no surprise there) using Intel’s Larabee project. The likely target date for us to see this computer is 2009, which corresponds to when Larabee is due. Until then they plan to use ATI/NVidia graphics cards. He says that the CEO believes they can retake the high-end graphics market.

For background here are some articles from ars technica on Larabee: one, two.

Resource Links:

Latest Video

Industry Perspectives

According to Intel, its new 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processor family includes Intel Deep Learning Boost for AI deep learning inference acceleration, fresh features and support for Intel Octane DC (data center) persistent memory, and more. Learn more about the offerings in a new issue of Parallel Universe Magazine. [READ MORE…]

White Papers

With the exponential growth of data that needs to be analyzed and the data resulting from ever-more complex workflows, the need for faster data movement has never been more challenging and critical to the worlds of High Performance Computing (HPC) and machine learning. Mellanox Technologies is once again moving the bar forward with the introduction of and end-to-end HDR 200G InfiniBand product portfolio. Download the new white paper, courtesy of Mellanox, that explores in-network computing and the benefits of the switch from 100G to 200G Infiniband.